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Filler Episode - The Brabant Killers
39 Plays1 year ago
M's jetting overseas once again, so Josh fills in by scarring your souls with a thoroughly depressing tale of murder and more murder. How depressing? At one point, Josh says "of the four, all but three died" - that was a mistake, which should have been "all but one died". Yeah.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:05
Speaker
The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Denteth. Hello, you're listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy. My name is Josh Edison in Auckland, New Zealand. Dr. Em Denteth.
00:00:26
Speaker
quite sure where they are at the moment, possibly in the air, possibly in Milan, possibly somewhere else, I'm not quite sure, but basically the good doctor is off on various conferency type activities, will be for the next week or two.
Filler Episode Context
00:00:42
Speaker
will presumably return back with an armful of interesting stories to tell and possibly recorded interviews to make up content for the next few weeks after that. But for right now, it falls to me to put in another one of these little filler episodes that we do when one of us is away.
00:00:59
Speaker
In usual style, I've gone back to our list of things we could maybe do an episode about sometime through a metaphorical dart at the metaphorical dartboard and came up with a story of, well, it's not actually a very nice story, a story of there's robbery, there's a fair amount of murder, and of course, some conspiracy. So how about I play a little chime and then I can tell you about that.
Who Were the Brabant Killers?
00:01:31
Speaker
Right, so Bucklin, because today I want to talk about the Brabant Killers. Brabant is a region in Belgium, that's sort of the anglicised pronunciation of the name, I'm sure the correct pronunciation is something slightly different. But between 1981 and 1985, there were a
00:01:50
Speaker
quite considerable amount of robberies which tended to involve murders as well, conducted by a group that came to be called the Brabant Killers, the Mad Killers of Brabant, the Nivel Gang, because that was the
00:02:08
Speaker
name of the region specifically where they were in or something like that. They were a group of three, maybe more, people who conducted what could only really be described as a spree of armed robberies, but a considerably sustained spree.
The Violent Robberies
00:02:25
Speaker
During these robberies, they would kill without hesitation. Sometimes they would kill without provocation, really. They seemed to just be quite happy to shoot anyone, literally anyone who got in their way.
00:02:38
Speaker
Over the course of the robberies, they were responsible for 28 deaths across the four years of their crimes and a similar number of injuries. The people killed included police officers and civilians, included adults and children. They just did not seem to care who they killed.
00:02:56
Speaker
So I said there's a group of three. There were three individuals who were sort of identified and given pseudonyms. One was called the giant because he was tall apparently and appeared to be the leader of the bunch. One was called the killer because apparently he was the one who did most of the killing. One who's called the old man who appeared to be a bit older and generally was the getaway driver. And there may have been more people to it than that. It's a little bit hard to tell.
00:03:22
Speaker
Reading up on this, I've seen their Wikipedia page has a copy of a wanted poster that was put out at the time of the whole bunch of identical photos. This poster shows 10 different faces that they were interested in, but then who knows how
00:03:38
Speaker
whether that means there are actually 10 people or whether some of those are the same person who'd been described by different witnesses and things like that. In some of their robberies, they wore masks or face paint to disguise themselves, but in other ones, apparently they didn't, especially earlier on. Sometimes they stole cars, sometimes they stole guns or other equipment that presumably they would then use in their other crimes,
00:04:02
Speaker
Sometimes they took things like jewelry or money or food sometimes. And in particular, when they stole stuff, it never really seemed to be enough to justify the risks they were taking and being just so brazen and so violent. There's the sort of crimes that had an entire country looking for them and still has a country looking for them to this day.
Mysteries and Unsolved Cases
00:04:25
Speaker
And they did all that for relatively
00:04:29
Speaker
relatively little money, really. Relatively little gain. Not no gain, obviously. They did. They got stuff out of it, but not enough that you would think to justify the lengths to which they went. So they started, when I say over four years, only just, they started December the 31st of 1981, where they stole automatic weapons, ammunition, and a car.
00:04:52
Speaker
Then in 1982, there were another five incidents recorded here, which included, again, stealing more guns, stealing a car, robbing a grocery store and stealing food and wine, during which they shot two police officers, more theft of weapons, robbing a restaurant, and again, just taking wine and stuff. And in, I think, every one of these cases,
00:05:20
Speaker
maybe not the first one someone was shot on the scene pretty much every when they're stealing cars they're actually carjacking people stealing cars at gunpoint 1983 there were hang on let me count here one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve ten fourteen
00:05:38
Speaker
14 instances across 1983 again. Robbery and murder of a taxi driver, theft of a car at gunpoint. They robbed over the time, they robbed a few supermarkets, which you see in 1983, one, two, three, four,
00:05:54
Speaker
five different supermarkets robbed in 1983, but then other times they would just steal cars, rob a restaurant, rob the jewellery shop. Like I say, they stole jewellery at one point. Now, there are no crimes blamed on this gang in 1984 at all. Again, that's one of the weird things about this case. But in 1985, they were back two more robberies in late 1985. In both cases, they robbed a supermarket,
00:06:21
Speaker
and in both places shot a bunch of people while they were doing it and again didn't steal let's see about about thirty thousand dollars i assume that's us dollars which would be about about fifty thousand dollars in today's money they reckon which for the the level of the the brazenness doesn't doesn't really seem worth it and then so because uh they robbed
00:06:45
Speaker
These two supermarkets, rather, in September, both in the same chain, so a bunch of security was increased at lots of those stores in the region, and yet they still managed to rob a third one on November of 1985.
00:07:00
Speaker
was the one they shot a family of four who just happened to be coming out of the shop as they were going in. All but three of them were killed. They shot a bunch more people inside and still managed to get away evading the armed patrols that had been set up around the place and the police that showed up. So 1985 was the last of their recorded crimes.
00:07:25
Speaker
And since then, equipment has sort of been fished out of various canals and what have you, I think starting in 1986 and carrying up until the present day. I saw a news article from January of this year that showed some men have pulled a gun out of a canal in Belgium somewhere, which they believe was a weapon used in these crimes.
00:07:49
Speaker
Now, as you possibly have gathered by the fact that I said the whole country is looking for them to this day, the killers have never been found or identified. There have been a bunch of suspects over the years, but none of them have ever panned out. In 2015, one man by the name of Christian Bonkovsky made a deathbed confession to having been the the giant of the gang, but he'd been considered as a suspect 15 years earlier and used DNA evidence from
00:08:19
Speaker
They had managed to gather DNA evidence, I assume, at some of the scenes and reckon that the DNA evidence ruled him out, said he couldn't have been one of these people. More recently, in 2020, the Belgian police released a photograph of a man standing in a forest holding a shotgun
00:08:35
Speaker
which had apparently been given to them back in 1986 or something, and at the time they were told this man is relevant to the case, but they weren't from the sounds of it. They didn't actually say this guy is one of the killers, but presumably that's implied. So again, in 2020, they're still conducting inquiries. You may recall when we talked some time ago about the murder of Uluf Palma, the Prime Minister of Sweden.
00:08:58
Speaker
who was murdered in the 80s and how at
The Ongoing Investigation
00:09:01
Speaker
the time they sort of passed a special sort of extension to the statute of limitations, specifically so they could continue investigating that case. And the same thing's happened here. There was also, they extended the statute of limitations so that these crimes could continue to be investigated, but that's going to run out in 2025. Now, when I started reading about this, I did a quick Google of the Brabant killers just to see if
00:09:26
Speaker
what else was around. And apparently in January of this year, a suspect was arrested in Thailand in connection with the crimes. You may recall that I was in Thailand in January of this year, although I checked the dates and that happened just before I arrived there. So I don't think I can take blame or credit for that, unfortunately. So yes, the guy, they've arrested one man who
00:09:50
Speaker
is a convicted murderer. He'd done time for killing a diamond dealer in the 90s and had apparently been considered as a suspect for a long time but has always denied any involvement. I don't know if they're picking him up now just because they're about to run out of time or not but we'll see if maybe something will come of that. Who knows? But only of course as they pointed out the men involved
00:10:09
Speaker
would probably be at least in their 70s by now, if they're even still alive. So basically we have a string of particularly nasty, violent, disturbing crimes and no resolution at all of it. And as you would probably expect, both from a crime of that nature and from the fact that I'm talking about it now in our podcast on conspiracy theories, there have been a bunch of conspiracy theories around
Theories and Speculations
00:10:36
Speaker
these killings. Now, obviously, the acts themselves are a criminal conspiracy. You've got a bunch of people who've worked together to plan and execute these things. So that is that's conspiracy all on its own. But there are more layers to that. There have been has been suggested that maybe they had connections to the police or the Belgian gendarmerie, partly because of the fact that, as I said, in the final spree, they managed to avoid
00:11:03
Speaker
the regular armed patrols of the supermarket that had been set up. Also, one of their robberies earlier in the 80s was a textile factory that had only just started making bulletproof vests for the police. So they robbed us specifically to steal the vests, and not a lot of people would have known.
00:11:20
Speaker
that those vests were being made at that time. There are various connections to a guy called Madani Bouhouche, who was a member of the Belgian gendarmerie and then eventually sort of turned to crime and apparently some of
00:11:37
Speaker
Some of the weapons that were stolen and some of the Brevant Killer's earlier crimes ended up being found on his property, although he hasn't been arrested or anything, so possibly they couldn't prove that they weren't just, you know, things that had been fenced later and had wound up in his possession. There have been also suggestions that this was actually tied to a wider sort of criminal organization, the Mafia or something like that.
Operation Gladio Connection
00:12:01
Speaker
In 1992, the BBC had a documentary on Operation Gladio, which is something that we've mentioned before, but never devoted a whole episode to, which suggested that there might have been a connection between the Brabant Killers, Operation Gladio, and a far-right paramilitary organisation called Westland New Post that had formed in 1981.
00:12:26
Speaker
the time when the killing started, broke up when its leader killed himself in 1984. So this documentary suggested that the leader of this group that was sort of an extremist, I don't know if they actually carried out any terrorist type acts, but it was the sort of thing they were
00:12:43
Speaker
thinking about. There was a suggestion that he had said before his death that he believed he was sanctioned by the Belgian government, and then there had been some connection drawn between his organization and the Brabant Killers, and then they were being tied up with Operation Gladio. If you don't recall,
00:13:00
Speaker
Operation Gladio was the name given to a bunch of so-called stay-behind networks that were set up in Europe after World War II. Technically, Operation Gladio was specifically the name of the Italian version of the Italian section of this operation, but for some reason it came to be used to refer to all of these ones. Stay-behind network is what they do when, if you're worried that
00:13:25
Speaker
your country may be overrun and occupied by an enemy force, you set up these networks who stay behind in the country after it's occupied to perform various acts of sabotage or terrorism or what have you against the occupying forces.
00:13:43
Speaker
So that these were set up all around Europe after World War II in fear of a Soviet takeover of Europe. They were run by NATO and the CIA eventually. I don't think either of those things existed to begin with. And there were implications always that some of the operatives
00:14:02
Speaker
that they got running to be in these networks set up by Operation Gladio were possibly ex-Nazis or Nazi sympathizers, because of course the Nazis fought against the Soviets. So there was there was there always been claims that they got some of these Soviet fighting Nazis overlooked their Nazism and just sort of
00:14:22
Speaker
hide them for their Soviet fighting abilities and set them up in these networks. So there are conspiracy theories around Operation Gladio, but that's not what we're here to talk about now. It apparently stopped at any rate in the 1990s.
00:14:34
Speaker
unless you believe the conspiracy theories that say that it didn't. Now the final branch of conspiracy theories regarding the Brabant killings are suggestions that maybe they were they were sort of a cover a bit of a smokescreen for actual targeted assassinations or maybe acts of domestic terrorism.
Conspiracy Theories
00:14:53
Speaker
Now I haven't seen a lot to actually
00:14:55
Speaker
The only person I've seen suggested as someone who might have been an actual assassination target who these killings were there to disguise was a banker who was killed in one of the first supermarket attacks in 1985. It just sort of seems like, oh, one of these people who got killed was a slightly important person. So maybe it was all about getting to him.
00:15:22
Speaker
there really doesn't really seem to be much behind that at all. And that really is all there is to say about the Brabant Killers. It is not a pleasant subject to look into, to be quite frank. There are just lots of stories of people just being killed for no real reason. Their emo, in many cases, seems to be just walk in and start shooting, and hence the thoroughly disturbing body count of 28 deaths.
00:15:51
Speaker
So it would be nice to give the story a happy ending or an ending at all, really. But unfortunately, the case is still ongoing. And who knows, maybe in two years' time, if they haven't found anything more, they might extend the case again. But for now, all we can do is say, well, that's really horrible. Be nice if they got the guys who did it, assuming they haven't died of old age by now. So on that cheery note,
Episode Conclusion and Future Content
00:16:18
Speaker
that little little little little burst of sunshine for you on your day i will bring this this little filler episode to an end and send you folks on your way so i'm not quite sure when em is back exactly from their little round the world jaunt but
00:16:34
Speaker
But I'm pretty sure there will be another filler episode for me next week. Then I think in two weeks' time, Em will be back and regaling us with tales of Europe. Maybe Em's run across a stay-behind network. Maybe Em is a member of a stay-behind network in Europe. Who knows? I can neither confirm nor deny.
00:16:57
Speaker
except that of course I can deny because that's nonsense. So there really isn't anything left for me to say this particular week, I think, then goodbye.
00:17:09
Speaker
The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, associate professor M.R.X. Stentors. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, remember, oh December, what a night.